Archive

First off, thanks to the folks at Rogers who hooked me up with a Rogers line and phone so I could test out the new service now available to all of their customers for free: Rogers One Number (RON).

Rogers One Number is, in Rogers’ own words, ‘is a new service exclusively from Rogers [which] lets you talk, text and send picture messages, and video chat with other Rogers One Number users, all from your computer using your existing phone number.’ The RON dialog on your computer also allows you to add email inboxes so you can manage as many different methods of communication from one spot as possible.

Before I get into my experiences I want to let you know my quick and dirty opinion on RON and if it is right for you. If you’re a Rogers customer sign up immediately. There is absolutely no reason not to, it’s free and it is a great tool to have at your disposal.

The whole thing was extremely easy to set up from the RON website but note that the setup has to be done from your desktop/laptop and cannot be done from your phone. Once my laptop* had it installed Read more…

Looks I will be heading to another event tomorrow this time, a tech event. The newest addition to the Sony Ericsson Xperia line, the Android powered “Sony Ericsson Xperia ray” will be officially launched tomorrow evening in Toronto by Sony Ericsson Canada and Telus. Telus will be having the exclusive rights to sell this new device in Canada.

You can follow all the goings on of the party tomorrow with the hashtag #XperiaRayLaunch on Twitter.

Now, on to the actual device. (Can we even call them “phones” anymore?) It comes in at a slim 9.4 mm according to the tech specs from Sony Ericsson and its frame is made of aluminum. Its screen, like all of Sony Ericsson’s Xperia devices, uses the enhanced contrast and richer colors via the ‘Reality Display’ of the Mobile BRAVIA Engine. (Yes, essentially the same BRAVIA technology as you have in your Sony TVs). It has a 8.1 MP back camera with Exmor R for mobile technology which is what is used in Sony’s camera division and a front facing 1.3 MP camera for video calling services such as Skype. It also runs Android Gingerbread right out the box which is a welcome change as the newer versions of Android have so many more features available.

I am looking forward to playing with this device tomorrow night as it looks like a very interesting beast of a phone in a small package. While I haven’t had a chance to play with the device itself as of yet, my friend Daniel Bader of MobileSyrup has already written a full review of the device available here http://mobilesyrup.com/2011/10/31/telus-sony-ericsson-xperia-ray-review/. However, after reading Daniel’s review I will say this about the phone – it look like it’ll be a really hot phone to be carrying in your pocket once Telus releases it. I say this because of two things which stood out for me reading Daniel’s review:

The battery life has me salivating. From Daniel’s MobileSyrup review “The Xperia ray comes with a relatively large 1500mAh battery for the device’s size, and we got excellent, multi-day battery life as a result.” And I can be fairly certain that Daniel used the phone as I would so those words have me impressed quite impressed.

Daniel gave it an 8/10 overall. Like I said above, I know Daniel put this phone through its paces because I know Daniel and if he is giving a phone an 8/10 that means this thing is well worth looking at more than once.

I swear I am not biased because I share the same first name as Daniel does…OK, maybe a little bit of bias but read his review and you’ll see how thorough he is!

Looking forward to being introduced to this little device tomorrow in real life. I’ll let all y’all know what I think of it and the event via Twitter. If there are any questions about the phone you want me to ask Sony Ericsson or specific aspects of the phone you’d like me to inspect IRL let me know in the comments below.

Until then, for more information on this phone and for the price when it is announced:

I just watched the German movie “Run Lola, Run” which came out in Germany in 1998 and was struck by how different this movie would have been if the characters had cellphones.

Without getting too plot heavy (and ruining the movie) the beginning of the movie hinges on Lola being late to meet her boyfriend and because there were no payphones around she couldn’t call him to tell him about her lateness. Him also not having a cellphone meant that when Lola didn’t show up and he couldn’t find any payphones either to try calling her house or another one of their friends (there seems to have been a severe lack of payphones in Germany in the late 90s) he had to take the subway. These 2 plot points lead to the entire movie believably being able to happen.

Run Lola Run English poster

Now think about the movie happening now or even five years later. Lola would have been able to call or text her boyfriend about what happened causing her to be late. Even if she didn’t, her boyfriend would have been able to call her to find out where she was or call a friend to come pick him up. The movie’s entire plot falls apart with the presence of cell phones. People in 20 years will watch this movie and think how quaint it was that they didn’t have phones with them at all times.

This brings me to my next point of how movies and TV plots have been affected by cellphones, the TV series “24”. This was a show that began a few short years later, premiering in November of 2001 and running until May 2010 but the presence and availability of cellphones the show possible.

“24” took place within a 24 hour period and each episode of the season was one hour of that day. The protagonist, Jack Bauer, and his friends at the fictional US Government agency CTU relied on cellphones and smartphones for the plot to develop at the breakneck speed which it played out. CollegeHumor even has a video of the supposed ‘lost pilot’ of 24 from 1994. In that clip, every time Jack needs to get in touch with CTU he has to run outside of the building he is infiltrating to a payphone with a quarter to call them. When they need to get schematics of a bomb to him, they need to print it out and bike courier it to him because at 950KBs to put it on a disk would take “THREE FLOPPIES“! Check it out below:

It is simply amazing how different our world is now that we have all these devices at our fingertips. However, watch a movie or TV show from even a little more than a decade ago and it really drives home what a big difference technology makes in our day to day lives. Without cellphones and smartphones 24 would have had to have been called 48, 72, or even 168 (that’s 24*7, or a full week…I did the math on a calculator so don’t feel embarrassed if you didn’t know that offhand).

Recently, I flipped past the movie “She’s All That” on TV randomly one day and I stopped to watch a bit because I remember Rachel Leigh Cook being really hot. As I watched for a few minutes, I was struck by the differences in our society since 1999 when, in that movie, you hear a ringer go off and all the girls in the high school’s popular and rich clique walking together pull out their pagers to check who got a page! A page! Times have certainly changed haven’t they!